


In December

by kres



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-28
Updated: 2005-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:33:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kres/pseuds/kres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I skipped the part about love.</p><p>[originally posted at kres.livejournal.com]</p>
            </blockquote>





	In December

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by winter, lack of light and lack of Jack.
> 
> Written for ev_vy, who, of course, got to beta her own present. And then she told me to beta it again :)=
> 
> Much thanks to three wonderful beta-voices of cdeacon, tempe, and tafkarfanfic.
> 
> Originally posted March 28, 2005 on kres.livejournal.com.

_I skipped the part about love.  
It seems so shallow; low._

 

In December, he is on Daniel’s doorstep.

The lights are out in the house, and that means Daniel is probably sleeping, but the plane was delayed and Jack spent four slow hours at the airport, so a hotel doesn’t really look like an option right now. The duffel bag is heavy on his shoulder, and the white puff of his breath reflects off the glass-paneled door. 

He doesn’t remember if he’s rung the doorbell already, so he raises his arm, cold sweeping the strip of skin between the glove and the sleeve, and he stops, thinks about touch and taste and smell, and his fingers, reaching.

Colors are muted into fogged gray.

Sounds are bubbles, floating from under water.

There is a slow shrill of the bell from inside the house, and Jack lets his hand fall back to his side, shivers a little in the cold. Cranes his neck – relax the muscles, it will help you get warmer – and looks around the front yard. 

The layer of snow is still thin, but the air is sharp, and this crispy Colorado winter feels almost like home.

There is warmth on his face.

“Jack?”

Movement, there, in the corner of his eye, a reaching of hand, a gesture cut off in the middle, and then he remembers how to play along. 

He turns his head, slides the bag off his arm, hands it over. “Hey.”

Pulled along, warmth, warmth on his skin, he steps over the threshold and into the familiar space of Daniel’s hallway. The lights are still off, but there’s a faint glow from the living room – a laptop, a paper-littered coffee table, a couch with barely a place to sit on.

There is a thump of the bag, being set down in a corner. And then Daniel’s hands, touching him, helping him take off his jacket and—

“Jack.” Daniel’s whisper, close by his ear, and—

Daniel’s feet, bare, making no sound on the floor, and—

Warmth, translating itself into heat, sinking under the collar of his shirt, creeping across his skin, and—

“Jack.” Daniel’s whisper, far, too far away.

The perspective shifts, the lines reassemble. Daniel is a shadow, framed in the door to the kitchen. “Come on in, Jack. I’ll get you a beer.”

Bubbles. Bubbles of dreaming, empty air swishing out of them.

“Water,” Jack says. Pleads. 

Daniel looks at him for a while, then nods, and Jack can see it, even though it’s dark.

Daniel rustles and clinks in the kitchen, and Jack stands in the hallway. His boots are heavy, so he bends to unlace them, and then toe them off. Yes, better like this, sock-clad feet on the warm, wooden floor.

In the living room he stops by the couch, looks around for a chair to sit on, but he finds he doesn’t really feel like sitting. He’s done enough sitting, back there at the airport. Four hours, looking at the departure table, watching the numbers, letters changing, flickering yellow and white, blinking an alien language not for him to decipher.

There is a swirling of lights on Daniel’s laptop, a string of letters, left to right, and little glowing numbers decreasing. Soft music from the speakers, he hears it just now.

“Here.” A touch of cold against the back of his hand.

“Thanks.”

Daniel watches him drink. Jack knows, because when he closes his eyes and swallows the cold, he can hear Daniel’s breath, he can feel Daniel’s muscles vibrating. His stomach is liquid, a container of ice, a thin line of shards all the way down from his throat, but it’s better this way, makes him grounded somehow, because the numbers were changing, delayed, cancelled, delayed, and he couldn’t keep up, couldn’t focus and reach—

The glass is empty. Jack opens his eyes, and there is Daniel, extending his hand.

Daniel’s fingers are cold when Jack hands him the glass, and his face is half-lit by the lazy swirls of the light from the laptop. He sets the glass on a shelf behind him without looking and steps closer.

“I missed you,” he says, accusingly. And then he presses his face into Jack’s neck, digs his fingers tight into Jack’s nape. “ _Fuck_ , I missed you so much.”

Jack stands still, breath caught in his throat. Daniel’s mouth is warm and soft against his skin – a half-empty coffee cup among the papers, Jack knows it’s there, and he knows Daniel’s lips will taste sour – and then he remembers, he remembers how this is supposed to go.

Dreams are bubbles, and they are floating, floating up, up and into the dark.

Jack flexes his fingers, closes his palms into fists.

“Don’t turn on the light,” he says, and he can barely hear himself speak.

Daniel nods, a sharp jerk of his head, chin bumping against Jack’s collarbone. “Okay.” He steps back, and there is blinking, blinking behind the swirls of the light in his glasses, before he turns around, reaches down—

—and sweeps all the stuff from his couch, _all_ of it: the papers, the books, the magazines, everything, he sweeps them right onto the floor in one fluid movement, and then turns around again, to reach over the pile towards Jack.

They fuck on the couch, in an awkward, graceless tangle of bodies. Daniel’s head is over the edge of the seat, his left arm braced against the floor, hand sliding over the magazines, fingers seeking purchase. Jack’s back is hurting; he is so tired, so tired today, but he stumbled over the pile and fell to his knees, and then Daniel’s hands were in his hair, fingers curled, but not really pulling, and Jack remembered how to do this, he remembered it all.

And Daniel must have remembered it too, because when Jack turned him over and pressed him down, he kept quiet, and still, and let himself be arranged to Jack’s liking.

But Daniel is sobbing on every breath now, and Jack isn’t sure any more. Dreams are bubbles, floating up, up into the dark, and he doesn’t remember if this is supposed to happen this way; slick skin, blue, green then violet, then black – the power saving is on – and Jack needs to know, because the numbers were changing, delayed, cancelled, delayed, and the letters were flickering, yellow, yellow and white, and the voice was there, too, melodious and liquid, sinking into Jack’s brain, echoing in his ears with the stream of delayed, cancelled, delayed, and he needs to _know_ , so he clamps his hand over Daniel’s mouth, grinds the sound between his fingers, muffles the echo of it in his palm.

“Shhh,” he whispers into Daniel’s hair, and holds them both still, waits for the echoes to cease, for the voices to fade into the soft, quiet dark, and—

“It’s just me,” he whispers into Daniel’s skin, and pulls out, his back arched, a curve of cold deep in the bones of his spine, and—

“I’m here,” he whispers—

But when he pushes back in, Daniel lurches forward, fingers scraping the floor, and the sound wheezed out between Jack’s fingers is sharp, like needles—

~

 

—he wakes with a jerk, and for a brief moment, when sleep is not really sleep, and the reality has not yet kicked in; he thinks it’s a body, warm against his own; he thinks it’s a body he’s holding, but it’s thin, far too thin, and too light, and it’s just the sheet, woven around him and curled into knots, and his hand closes, empty.

A phase shift, click, click, and he used to be fast, he used to be lucid by now, he knows, he remembers. But there is an ache in his bones, a long journey, must be, and his brain has difficulties deciding what’s real and what’s not.

Daniel cried out between his fingers, body coiling forward to escape from Jack’s touch.

Daniel switched on the light in the hallway, and said, “Come on in, Jack. I’ll get you a beer.”

White, white walls of Daniel’s guest bedroom. White ceiling. A closed window, and Jack knows the air is probably stale, there’s no vent; there’s no venting of thoughts.

The bubbles float up and burst, disappearing.

There is cold on his belly when he sweeps off the sheet. He stares at himself for a moment, a phase shift, click, click…

No venting of thoughts. No venting of need.

_Christ._

He grimaces, sits, wipes himself clean with his t-shirt. Then he looks around. 

The bag is by the closet, where he left it last night, after—

After—

“It’s just for a few days,” he said. The beer was good. Bitter, fresh, right from the bottle.

Daniel nodded, slowly. He was picking the label off his own beer. 

“Five months, Jack,” he said. Quiet. Polite. But he didn’t look up.

“So how’s things?” Jack asked after a minute.

Daniel glanced at him then, just a little too sharp, but he didn’t say anything more. He looked back at the bottle instead, chewed briefly on his lower lip. Then he shrugged, turned the bottle in his fingers, once, twice. 

“Good,” he said, carefully. “They’re good, I guess.” 

The bottle, turning, turning, drops of condensation, Daniel’s fingers, wet. Cold. Jack tore his eyes away. Cleared his throat.

“The new guy… what’s his name… He treating you well?”

The bottle stopped. Daniel grimaced. “ _Which_ new guy?”

A joke. Good. That’s more like it. Jack leaned back, took a pull of his beer. “All of them. What do you say we start with the first who pops into your head?”

“Okay.” Daniel paused, considered. “So. Cameron.” Fluid, fluid sound, Daniel’s mouth curled around the name. “Sam likes him.”

Jack inclined his head. “Bet she does. Teal’c?”

“Still doesn’t talk to him much.”

Figures. “How ‘bout glaring?”

“Um.” Right on the mark. Daniel furrowed his eyebrows. “No. Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Ah.” Jack smiled. “A warm welcome.”

—the bag is by the closet, where he put it last night, after they’d finished the beers and the conversation that was just this side of meaningful, but not quite enough.

His knees protest just a little when he stands up, and then some more, when he kneels on the floor by the bag. Zip, zipper open, and he fishes out a pair of socks – soft, furry carpet up here, but not on the trip to the bathroom. Cold, clean tile, he slides, catches the edge of the sink.

“Five months, Jack,” Daniel said, tore the edge of the label, ground it between his fingers.

The kitchen is downstairs, and he passes the living room on the way. He stops in the hallway, sock-clad feet on the warm, wooden floor.

The living room floor is empty, and so is the couch. There’s no electronic equipment, and the coffee table is under the far wall, artifacts lined up, gathering dust.

~

“Hey. You’re up early.”

He’s just finished his cereal. He puts the bowl into the sink, turns around.

Daniel is standing in the door to the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He looks like a definition of the lack of caffeine.

Jack smiles. “Busy day today. You?”

Daniel blinks a few times, runs a hand through his hair—

—and Jack is reminded of the movement Daniel used to make, long ago, that aborted, fluid motion of fingers – a tucking behind his ear of a strand that was not there any more.

“…-hour post-mission stand-down,” Daniel is saying. “Wa…” He yawns, cranes his neck. “Wait up. I’ll drive you.”

Daniel is still in his boxers. He has slippers on his feet. Jack circumvents him in the doorway.

“Thanks. I think I still know my way to the mountain.”

“I’ll drive you,” Daniel says, unhindered, stifling another yawn.

By the time Jack is downstairs again, Daniel is putting on his boots. He glances up in mid-gesture, laces tight around his fingers. He pauses, looks Jack up and down, lifts his eyebrows. “No uniform?”

“No uniform, no jet, no nothing,” Jack says. “Unofficial.”

He doesn’t say _personal_ , but Daniel nods just the same, then goes back to tying his boots. 

Jack looks out of the window. 

“There’s three feet of snow out there,” he says. “You sure you up to this pleasure? I distinctly remember you not being fond of the snow.”

Daniel nods, scrambles to his feet, grabs a jacket off the hook. “Yup, and I’m still not. But I want to see the look on Sam’s face when she sees you. We all wondered what Washington needed you for so badly they wouldn’t even let you call.” He casts a brief smile towards Jack, his eyes not quite stopping to focus. 

Daniel’s eyes are still puffed. Sleepy. Jack realizes Daniel didn’t even stop for a coffee.

“It’s like you dropped off the face of the Earth,” Daniel adds then, off-handedly, and the politeness of not asking the question is like a knife scratching against glass, and Jack feels the sound of it in his teeth.

He forces a smile, but he can’t really keep it, so he looks at the tips of his boots instead.

“It’s classified,” he says, and he can barely hear himself speak.

There’s a pause, like a holding of breath, and then, “Oh. Okay.”

And then there’s shuffling, and a jingle of keys, a clink of the lock, and cold sweeps into the hallway, ghosting over Jack’s bare hands. Jack shivers a little, zips up the jacket, then forces his body to move, and his legs to carry him over the threshold. Outside, Daniel’s boots crunch on the snow.

The sun hasn’t risen yet, and the glow of the streetlamps shivers in the crystalline air. Daniel is already by the car, scraping ice from the windshield when Jack remembers.

“Daniel?”

Daniel pauses, a question mark in black leather and jeans, arched over the dark blue of the hood. “Yes, Jack?”

It would be funny, on any other occasion, and Jack could crack a joke about coffee or lack thereof, but Daniel is about to be driving a _car_ , goddamn it.

Jack gestures towards his own face. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Daniel blinks. His eyebrows are still. Expressionless. Then he smiles again, and it’s almost gentle, this time, it feels almost familiar.

“Contacts, Jack” he says softly, and then goes back to the scraping.

He doesn’t say _Five months, Jack_ , but Jack can hear it anyway.

~*~

**Author's Note:**

> Song credit to R.E.M.


End file.
